Name : Muhammad Rizwan Dalimunthe

NIM

: 15080036
Level Of Stress

Before we talk about level of stress, first we must know what is word stress ?.
Word stress is your magic key to understanding spoken English. Native speakers of
English use word stress naturally. Word stress is so natural for them that they don't
even know they use it.
So far, we have looked at syllables in terms of being either stressed or
unstressed. In fact within longer words syllables can have different degrees of
stress. To be more theoretically accurate, we should consider all syllables in terms of
their level of stress, rather than its presence or absence, particularly when
dealing with words in isolation. Different commentators have outlined up to five
different levels of stress in a single word: Daniel Jones, in An Outline of English
Phonetics cites the word opportunity, which has five levels of stress as seen below. `1'
indicates the greatest level of stress, and `5' the least.

Jones qualified this, however, by saying that he thought that this viewpoint
needed `modification', and that here stress was affected by `subtle degrees of vowel and
consonant length, and by intonation' (1960: 247). While Jones' example seems
somewhat excessive for our purposes, the existence of different levels of stress is well
documented and evidenced. Many commentators settle on a three-level distinction
between primary stress, secondary stress and unstress, as seen in the following
examples.

However, in practical terms a two-level division (stressed or unstressed) is usually

adequate for teaching purposes. Many people (including many teachers)
will have difficulty in perceiving more than two levels of stress with any
confidence. Two levels of stress are enough to attune learners' ears and attention to
how stress acts within words and utterances. This is not, of course, to discourage
teachers from further investigations into the nature of stress at a deeper level. The
deeper one's understanding of the subject matter, the better one's teaching of it is
likely to be. Teachers need to be as informed as possible in order to be better able to
make the decision as to what to include in lessons. If students notice or enquire about
more than two levels of stress, then of course this should be acknowledged and
discussed in class. The teacher must feel confident in making informed decisions
about the method and content of these discussions, backed up by professional
knowledge.

o.O..
opportunity
O . o
telephone
O . o
subtitute
In long words, it is often necessary to stress more than one syllable. For example, the
word indivisibility has more than one stressed syllable. However, not all of the
stressed syllables are given the same importance: there exists more than one level of
stress in English. In this example, the syllable bil is the one is stressed the most,
which is called primary stress. The syllable in receives what is called secondary
stress, and the syllable vi tertiary stress.

1. Primary stress
2. Secondary stress
in
3. Tertiary stress
0.Unstressed syllables

BI
vi
di

si

li

It is important to keep in mind that several syllables can be stressed in long words;
but for our purposes on this website, we will focus mainly on the primary stress, and
partially on the secondary stress.

ty